Our holdings include hundreds of glass and film negatives/transparencies that we've scanned ourselves; in addition, many other photos on this site were extracted from reference images (high-resolution tiffs) in the Library of Congress research archive. (To query the database click here.) They are adjusted, restored and reworked by your webmaster in accordance with his aesthetic sensibilities before being downsized and turned into the jpegs you see here. All of these images (including "derivative works") are protected by copyright laws of the United States and other jurisdictions and may not be sold, reproduced or otherwise used for commercial purposes without permission.

Mom plays "pass the baby brother" and my sister yuks it up with Uncle Don in Gary, Indiana. Meanwhile, the mantel is sideways at the house on Bass Lake in this double exposure. From early 1960's Kodachrome. View full size.

We broke out the slides when my father was near death this past Winter. By the time of his funeral I had pared it down to a select hundred or so and entertained Mom, my siblings, and our kids a couple of times. Not that Dad missed out. He got one last show when I visited earlier in 2007 and brought them down from the upstairs closet along with the old Graflex Constellation projector. The smell of a warm projector! I love that smell.

Having kids of our own allows us to recognize the sweet and delicate and vulnerable embrace my brother's godfather is relishing in this shot and it ties us to the past more strongly than we could have expected when as kids we were squirming in front of the screen waiting for the next slide and hoping yourself was in the shot.

Dad used his trusty Kodak Retina in the smooth brown leather case. My older sisters always complained that he shot on slide film instead of prints that they could more readily enjoy or share with friends. Dad preferred the clarity of Kodachrome and I didn't know that about him until after I cultivated my own preference for quality, which in my time means preferring film to digital.

Christmas 1964 in Rochester, Indiana. Kodachrome slide. View full size.[It's Christmas in June (for me, especially) with an exceptional selection of member-submitted color slides. There are even more here. Thanks, Santa! - Dave]

Shorpy.com | History in HD is a vintage photo blog featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1950s. The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago.